Reviews of Performances and their Audiences.

* Notes *Opera Parallèle has opened yet another impressive production with Peter Maxwell Davies' chamber work The Lighthouse, which has a three performance run this weekend at Z Space in San Francisco. Scored for only about a dozen instrumentalists and three singers, the music is rich and vivid. The tense atmosphere of the narrative, which involves the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers, however, was not terribly dramatic.

The boredom, fear, and claustrophobia of being in a lighthouse without knowing when relief will come definitely comes through in the music. Tenor Thomas Glenn (Sandy, Officer 1), baritone Robert Orth (Blazes, Officer 2), and bass-baritone David Cushing (Arthur, Voice of the Cards, Officer 3) all are clearly talented, and are carefully characterized.

Orth's brightness was particularly macabre in "When I was a kid our street had a gang," and the banjo playing from David Tanenbaum here was also splendid.

Maestra Nicole Paiement kept everyone clear and together. It did not seem to matter at all that hornist Susan Vollmer played from offstage in the prologue and percussionists William Winant and Ben Paysen were separated from the rest of the orchestra.

Director Brian Staufenbiel employs a metal frame version of a light house. The scenery involves large panels of fabric manipulated by four dancers in hooded unitards, culminating in a fog scene in which ghosts appear to the lighthouse keepers. The layers of fabric swirl and obfuscate and make good use of the space.

The libretto, written by the composer, is spare, the piece is only 72 minutes long. While it is creepy, I did not find it as stirring as the music, the central conflict of two characters not getting along and being cooped up together is easy to relate to but isn't necessarily great theater.

The end also seemed to demystify the disappearance of the lighthouse keepers. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, as Davies has stated his opera "does not offer a solution to the mystery," but I could not help feeling that whatever did happen, it was obviously more mundane than supernatural.

* Tattling * The announcement to turn off cellular telephones and locate emergency exists before the performance sounded like something out of Disney's Haunted House.

* Notes *SF Opera Lab hosted a cine-concert version of Les Triplettes de Belleville in mid-April. The 2003 animated film was projected on the south wall of the Atrium Theater as composer-conductor Benoît Charest not only lead seven instrumentalists and the chanteuse Doriane Faberg, but also played guitar.

The last evening of the run, on April 23, was completely immersive and charming. The piece has little dialogue and it is easy to take in the performers and the film at the same time without losing the thread of the narrative.

While the piece has many traditional instruments such as bass, saxophone, and such, it also requires playing a bicycle and newspaper.

Tattling *Even the smallest children at the concert were utterly silent during the movie. This was a much different experience than seeing films with SF Symphony playing, perhaps because of the intimacy of the venue.

* Notes *Opera San José's 2015-2016 season ends with a musically impressive but dramatically wanting A Streetcar Named Desire (pictured left with Matthew Hanscom, Ariana Strahl, and Stacey Tappan; photograph by Pat Kirk), which opened last weekend. The orchestra has never sounded better and there is much fine singing, but the minimalist production is not completely successful.

André Previn's opera, based on the famous play by Tennessee Williams, first premiered in the Bay Area nearly twenty years ago at San Francisco Opera. The production at San José, designed and directed by Brad Dalton, features a rather bare stage in front of the orchestra. The two rooms are represented by furniture -- a bed, two tables, and eighteen chairs -- that are moved around by seven rough-looking male supernumeraries.

There isn't a good sense of what is inside and what is outside, it isn't clear what the supernumeraries are doing on stage besides changing the set (often unnecessarily, since much of the action simply happens in the same two rooms) and echoing the look of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski in stage and film versions of the play.

The scenes that reference the upstairs of the building are especially problematic. The upstairs neighbor Eunice stands on a chair to represent her calling from above at one point, and at the end of Act I Stanley interacts with Eunice, Blanche, and Stella all upstage, but with him downstage facing the audience.

Dalton also makes use of ghosts, having the young collector played by Xavier Prado stand in for Blanche's ill-fated husband and Teressa Foss (who also is cast as the nurse) wander through as one of Blanche's dead relatives. Perhaps this is to re-enforce how crazy Blanche is, but it was more of a confusing distraction than anything else.

All this said, I do very much appreciate Dalton's creativity, and that he did not simply recreate the well-known set of the play or film. Having the orchestra behind the singers also worked very much in the piece's favor, the playing never overwhelmed the voices.

Maestro Ming Luke had the orchestra sounding cohesive and perfectly in tune. Despite the fact that the conductor was behind the singers, there was hardly any synchronization issues. The screens above the ground floor of the audience used to cue the characters apparently worked very well. The jazzy parts of Previn's music swung and sounded idiomatic.

The singing was excellent. Tenor Kirk Dougherty had the perfect amount of awkwardness for Harold "Mitch" Mitchell, and his scenes with Strahl were convincing. On the other hand, baritone Matthew Hanscom lacked a certain sexual dangerousness for the role of Stanley Kowalski. Though Hanscom's voice is strong, his performance comes off as cartoonish.

Soprano Stacey Tappan (Stella Kowalkski) had a strong Opera San Jose debut, her voice is sweet and her post-coital hum at the end of Act I came off beautifully. Soprano Ariana Strahl also had a fine debut with the role of Blanche DuBois, and sang with a devastating brilliance and incredible ease. Her clarion tones were a wonderful contrast to Tappan's, you could never mistake one for another. In the end the drama does come through in the music, Stahl portrays Blanche's harrowing experiences with conviction, and the performance was satisfying despite the flawed staging.

Tattling *There was the usual light chatter when the orchestra played but no one was singing.

* Notes *SF Opera Lab had its first new production premiere last night with Svadba-Wedding last night. The a cappella opera for six female voices by Serbian Canadian composer Ana Sokolović is the perfect scale for the Atrium Theater and director Michael Cavanagh's made use of the whole space.

Sokolović's opera is pretty without being cloying, the Balkan rhythms employed hold much interest. This is much closer to being avant-garde than most of the world premieres we've heard at the War Memorial in the last decade. There were moments when the music reminded me of Kitka, but Sokolović has a very charming and peculiar point of view. Often there is much humor in the onomatopoeic sounds the singers produce. The piece is short, a mere 60 minutes, but has a timelessness to it, and not at all in a bad way.

There are many instruments used by the singers including metal drinking cups with chains and spoons; tom-tom drum; gong; rainsticks, and ocarinas (ancient wind instruments). The voices have a haunting quality, there seemed to be three sopranos and three mezzo-sopranos. The singing was clear and had an immediacy in the small room.

Cavanagh's staging uses a central round platform and five other littler platforms all around the room. The audience is seated at round tables, much like a wedding reception.

Tattling *It was hard for the audience members to talk much, given how immersive the performance was, and how the singers basically surrounded us at different moments.

After the performance was an actual reception, complete with croquembouche, champagne, and a DJ.